Shiitake all-round or donko: which strain for your garden?

If you want to grow shiitake on logs, our shop offers two kinds of plug spawn: Shiitake All-round and Shiitake Donko. Both are Lentinula edodes, the same species, with the same flavour at heart. Still, the choice is not arbitrary. The two strains differ in when they fruit, what they look like and how much patience they demand. This piece helps you pick the right one.

What is the difference in short?

All-round is a strain that fruits across a wide temperature range, in spring and in autumn, and gets going fairly quickly. Donko is a cold-weather strain: it fruits slowly, at low temperatures, and in doing so makes the thick, meaty caps that Japanese growers get their highest prices for. Put simply: all-round for volume and certainty, donko for quality and patience.

What does donko actually mean?

Donko is the Japanese word for a shiitake harvested before the cap opens: thick, round, with the edge still curled inward. When such a cap grows slowly in cold, dry weather, its surface cracks into a white pattern, and that is called hanadonko, the flower donko. The opposite is koshin: a thin, wide-open cap that grew fast in warm, wet weather. The donko strain has been selected to produce exactly that thick form under cold conditions. All-round can also give a donko-shaped cap when it is cold, but does so less consistently.

Choose all-round if...

• this is your first shiitake log and you mainly want it to work;
• you want two harvest windows a year, spring and autumn;
• your garden is simply an ordinary temperate one: changeable, not extremely cold, not extremely sheltered;
• you want to be able to shock the log in cold water to trigger a flush, which all-round responds to well.

Choose donko if...

• you have a cool, shady spot, for instance the north side of the house or an open wood;
• you prefer fewer but finer mushrooms, and want to dry them too;
• you have patience: expect eighteen months to two years before the first harvest, and then mostly in the cold season;
• you have oak or beech, because donko benefits even more than all-round from dense, hard wood that lasts.

Can you combine them?

Yes, and that is what we do ourselves. Two or three all-round logs for certainty and volume, and one thick oak with donko for the beautiful caps in winter. From the second year onward you then have something almost year-round: all-round in April and October, donko in the cold months in between. But one strain per log, never mix two strains in the same piece of wood.

Does the flavour differ?

Freshly fried you taste little difference, both deliver the deep, savoury shiitake flavour. The difference is in the bite and in what happens when drying. A thick donko cap stays meaty even after drying and develops more of the umami shiitake is famous for. A thin all-round cap dries into a crisp chip that releases its flavour faster in a broth. If you mostly eat fresh, you will barely notice. If you dry and stock up, choose donko.

And which wood?

For both: oak is best, beech comes right behind, and birch or ash work too but do not last as long. Logs of 15 to 25 cm thick and a metre long, inoculated in February or March using the rule of thumb from our calculator piece. Shiitake is slower than oyster mushroom, so give it the full complement of plugs: rather slightly too many than too few. Still undecided? Email us a photo of the spot and the wood and we will tell you which of the two will do best there.